2009-06-02

The game of Tetris has turned 25 24. I don't care very much about computer games,
but I've nevertheless spent quite a bit of time playing Tetris - its
brilliance is in its simplicity.

Obviously, emacs comes with a Tetris-clone; just type M-x tetris RET and
there you go! There is very little useful things to customize about the game,
except maybe you'd like to keep your ~/ clean and set:

(setq tetris-score-file
"~/.emacs.d/tetris-scores")

I'd also like to point to the lisp source code, which is only 658 lines long -
almost CodeGolf-worthy. It's an interesting read if you are that kind of person. To see the source code, access the help for M-x tetris, i.e., press C-h f tetris and Enter (as discussed in Helpful Emacs). You'll get a help buffer then, which includes a link to tetris.el,
the source code; obviously, you need to have the sources installed. In
Ubuntu/Debian, you can install the source code through the emacs22-el or
emacs-snapshot-el packages, depending on the version of emacs you're using.

Thanks to emacs, you can actually read the source code in one buffer, while
playing tetris in the other one!

That could be annoying... also note on http://www.tetris.com/ (the official Tetris site) that there's a featured link on the left about the 25th anniversary, along with http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090602/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_tetris_turns25 (just one of various articles on the topic).